We've written before about the story of the Good Samaritan but I want to approach this passage from a different perspective today.
In Luke's Gospel, we find a lawyer questioning Jesus, and his goal is to find out exactly what he needs to do to make his way into Heaven. Jesus, ever the Teacher, turns the question around and asks him what he reads in the law.
The man's response is telling.
Luke 10:27, "So he answered and said, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
Jesus tells the man that he has answered rightly, and the man proceeds to push back on Jesus by asking, "Who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:29)
This, of course, leads into the story of the Good Samaritan, where Jesus concludes by asking the Lawyer who was the man's neighbor, and the lawyer answers and says that it was the one who showed mercy. Jesus then commands him to go and do likewise.
In today's digitalized and internet inter-connected society, it can be very easy to dehumanize people, to treat them poorly, and to isolate ourselves from those around us. In fact, we often only consider our neighbors to be those who live in the same area as us, if we happen to know them. But, when we go back to the text in the original language, we find that your neighbor wasn't just someone you shared a fence with.
The word translated neighbor also means fellow person, countryperson, Christian, friend, or someone who is close by.
In other words, our neighbors are everyone we come in contact with. It doesn't matter if they vote Democrat, Republican, if they have a different skin color than you, a different sexual orientation, lifestyle, or whatever. If they're here on this earth breathing in oxygen, they're your neighbor.
So how are we to treat them?
The Lawyer in this passage notes that we are to love them as we love ourself.
I submit to you that that is what it means to be a Christian.
I know, I know, I know, that goes contrary to everything you've ever been told, but let's look at Jesus' words.
In Matt 7:12, He tells us that the Law and the Prophets are summed up by treating others how you want to be treated. When the rich young ruler comes to Him and asks how he can receive eternal life, Jesus doesn't point him to anything that needs to be done in relation to his love for God, Jesus directs him back to how he treats his neighbor. "Jesus said, “‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ” Matthew 19:18-19
In Jesus we find a Savior who tells us repeatedly that the entirety of the Old Testament is summarized in how we treat our neighbors.
This doesn't make sense to us in our traditional reading of scripture, but let's look at Jesus' discussion with this same Lawyer in Matthew's Gospel.
"But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 22:34-40
We find something interesting in this passage. Notice that Jesus the first commandment Jesus gives us in the Law is to love God, but then He tells us that the second commandment is like the first, or, the second is at the same place or time, together, and closely associated (according to the Greek) with the first, to love your neighbor as yourself.
In other words, Jesus is saying that the greatest commandment is to love God, but the second is closely associated and works together with the first: To love your neighbor as yourself.
This is why Jesus repeatedly points us to how we treat other people when He tells us how we obtain eternal life and how He summarizes the Law and the prophets. He was willing to let treatment of other people stand alone, but when He brings God into the picture in response to the Lawyer after challenging the accepted religious interpretation, He admits that yes, the first commandment is to love God, but loving people is inseparable from that.
Friend, I submit to you that we have neglected how we treat our neighbor, our horizontal relationships, in favor of what we perceive to be vertical piety. But the vertical cannot be attained to without the horizontal.
Notice that of the 10 Commandments, often held to as God's standard (we know that we don't live by them under Grace, but this is still an informative exercise), the first four have to do with our relationship with God, but the last six have to do with how we treat and care for and love our neighbor.
If there is anything that calls our fealty to Christ into question, it isn't the fact that we're not hard enough on what we perceive to be sin, it's the fact that we're so concerned with standing up for God that we forget to love people. Jesus directly tied how we love our neighbor to our love for God.
If you can't stand up and say that you love someone with no caveats, you've missed what Jesus was saying in the scripture. Jesus said the way that people will know you've truly come to know Him is by our love (John 13:35).
In fact, this message made such a mark on the Apostle John that he wrote, "If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?" 1 John 4:20.
This word used for love is Greek word Agape. As we talked about on Seeing Jesus More Clearly, this word refers to the covenant love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God. The term necessarily extends to the love of one's fellow human beings."
Pastor Michael Smith said of this passage that Jesus' words made such a mark on John's life that, “[he] said that whoever said he does the vertical and loves God, but he doesn’t love people, that man is a liar. He hasn’t seen God, he doesn’t know God.”
So, I ask you this question again, as the Lawyer asked Jesus: Who is my neighbor? How can I show them love, mercy, and compassion today?
By Grace,
Dave